Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Saturday, February 26, 2005

Part I: Pulling A Lenny: Evolution, Prevolutionand Lenny Harris' Deboning of the Marlins

Invention is
the mother of necessity -- Thorsten Veblen

Soon after my daughter started 5th grade she learned to listen
to her peers and give them credence equal to that she gave her
mother. It's a normal choice for someone that age. And it's
equally normal that some of that advice will be given by sheer
incompetents or will be totally dysfunctional ideas from a
perfectly reasonable kid.

The case in point was an innovation sparked by a kid named
Lennie. Since much of the mojo around pecking order was based on
athletic shoes, Lennie decided there needed to be a post-purchase
innovation to the shoes that he could claim as his own. I'm
confident he didn't think about it too long, because the
innovation he sparked, and that soon spread to any kid who wanted
to be cool, was an evolutionary dead-end based on a total lack of
investigation.

Lennie decided that from now on, athletic shoes should be
laced in reverse...starting at the ankle and working down towards
the toe with the bow laced in the front. This was a demented idea
worthy of the post-victory moves of Esposito, the Latin American
rebel leader, upon liberating San Marcos in the movie Bananas ("From this day on, the official language
of San Marcos will be Swedish. In addition to that, all citizens
will be required to change their underwear every half-hour.
Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.
Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now... 16 years
old!"). Only three things were wrong with the
idea: (1) kids kept tripping by stepping on their front-bows, (2)
it took about ten times a long to get the shoes on or off, and
(3) there was not one thing better or more functional about it --
there was nothing right about it.
It lasted less than a week, but it was ugly while it happened.

This type of seat-of-the-pants innovation with no testing
happens too frequently at the hands of executives and managers and peers in
all kinds of organizations. Ever since the week my daughter tried
to endure that innovation, I have called these brain-spasms of
the nanosecond that get implemented without even a couple of
minutes of investigation or doing the simple research
"pulling a Lennie".

After 20 years, I may have to change that spelling. Because
this week, according to this
story in the Sun-Sentinel, Florida Marlin utility player
Lenny Harris is counseling team leadoff hitter Juan Pierre to
walk more, specifically by being more consistent with his
approach on pitches when he has three balls in the count. By
doing this, Lenny suggested, Pierre could be more like Tony Gwynn
and Wade Boggs and have a better chance to win a batting title.

Working out together for
most of the offseason, veteran Lenny Harris drilled one
thought into leadoff hitter Juan Pierre's head -- think
batting title.

Harris wants Pierre to aim high and "shoot for the
stars." After Pierre led the Marlins with a .326 batting
average last season and finished second in the majors with a
club-record 221 hits, Harris believes Pierre has all the
makings of a batting champion.

"We talked about it a lot this offseason," Harris
said. "When I first mentioned it to him, I don't think
his expectations were that high yet, but that's what he has
to reach for. He's got the ability to do it as long as he's
more consistent on ball fours. If he's going to be the type
of hitter like [Wade] Boggs and [Tony] Gwynn, he's got to
walk more."

A year ago, Pierre led the Marlins with a .374 on-base
percentage but only walked 45 times. Because he's one of the
fastest runners in baseball, Pierre hasn't been as patient at
the plate because he feels he can beat out bunts and infield
dribblers. "I'd have to get 250 hits or walk more [to be
a batting champ]," Pierre said. "I have to do one
or the other. Sixty walks would help out."

On the surface, it seems like it might be worth a try.
Contemporary baseball researchers and sabermetrics aficionados
are enamored with the walk because it's been underrated for so
long. In essence, since runs are the ultimate measure of success
in a game, and since a necessary precursor of scoring is being a
baserunner, it makes sense to harvest every opportunity you can
to become a baserunner, and walks, as unromantic as they seem,
are something you don't even have to create...you can can
"take" them from opposing pitchers. And this will
definitely raise your on-base percentage (because letting ball
four go by and taking first with a walk is a higher on-base move
than swinging, even at a meatball hanging curve, and putting it
into play with a perfect smack because there's not a 100% chance
the defense won't put you out or that the ball would be foul. And
it has a good chance of raising your batting average because if
you are letting a higher percentage of out of the strike zone
pitches go by, you're going to have better success with the ones
you do swing at and should make fewer easy outs.

But while this is overwhelmingly true in the general case, the
average, that a player who is more patient and works pitchers for
incremental walks is going to have a better on-base percentage
and likely end up with a better batting average, it's not
true for every single player.

It's not true, even remotely, for Juan Pierre.

There can be useful torque in taking tips from teammates. Sometimes they see things differently from managers. Sometimes, they're willing to look at data management won't. Not in this case.

Harris clearly pulled this Lennie without ever looking at
Pierre's historical record. Not only has he been consistent on
balls four, more important, he's been blisteringly effective.
Here, courtesy of MLBPA and Yahoo, is Pierre's career historical
performance and at or after selected counts. I abridged
this table so we can focus on the Lennie Lenny pulled.

Juan
Pierre Career Situational Stats

AB

H

2B

3B

HR

BB

K

AVG

OBP

SLG

OPS

Total

2755

859

98

35

7

185

166

.312

.361

.380

.742

AB

H

2B

3B

HR

BB

K

AVG

OBP

SLG

OPS

Count 0-0

343

114

9

2

2

1

0

.332

.342

.388

.730

Count 3-0

0

0

0

0

0

46

0

.000

1.000

.000

.000

After (3-0)

45

22

1

0

1

80

3

.489

.811

.578

1.389

Count 3-1

27

10

0

0

1

87

0

.370

.852

.481

1.334

After (3-1)

109

47

6

0

1

111

5

.431

.717

.514

1.231

Count 3-2

155

62

10

1

0

51

11

.400

.548

.477

1.025

After (3-2)

155

62

10

1

0

51

11

.400

.548

.477

1.025

For his career, Pierre has been a leadoff hitter, so his job
in the normal baseball view and the sabermetric view is to get on
base. Up until 2004, Pierre has gotten on base at a .355 clip,
though last year he improved it to .375, about 13% better than
the league. His career OPS is a middling .740, about median for
starting players, neither good nor bad. He walks rarely (more
than he strikes out, which is a strong, not definite, indicator
of decent plate judgment) so his on-base reflects mostly his
ability to hit the ball and be safe at first.

Clearly, he has room for improvement and a swell foundation
from which to build. But being more consistent on balls four
isn't a place for growth.

You can only have a potential ball four thrown at you on the
following counts: 3-0, 3-1, and 3-2.

On 3-0, he's obeyed the accepted wisdom of the ages and not
put the ball in play even once. He's walked 46 of the 171 times
he's been thrown a 3-0 pitch. He's created no outs at 3-0. No
harm. Just fine, thank you.

In the roughly 125 times he didn't walk on a 3-0
pitch (that is, the pitcher threw a strike and he had to go on in
the at bat to 3-1 and possibly further) he had a batting average
of .490 and an on-base percentage of .810. He had a Bonds-ian OPS
of 1.390. Once Pierre worked the count to 3-0 (that is, a count
where his handling of potential balls four) he is Godzilla, Rodan
and the resurrection of Sliding
Billy Hamilton combined.

Does he need to change the way he deals with potential 4th
balls? No way.

Here's another indicator: What he does on 3-2 pitches. The 3-2
count is not automatically in the batter's favor...the batter
pretty much has to swing at anyhting that might be a strike, but
the batter will more often get a strike, as well. On composite
average, it's pretty close to a wash, but with a high
variance depending on the kind of batter at the plate.

Pierre's OPS on 3-2 pitches that finish his plate appearances
is a super-charged (for him anyway) 1.025, 39% better than his
average. The last thing in Pierre's game he needs to worry about
is handling plate appearances where he might see a 4th ball.

BEYOND BASEBALL
How often have you worked in a group where the manager hopped on
some bandwagon she'd heard about at a seminar or trade show and
tried to implement it without investigating the details of how it
might work in your group's context?

I had an associate who had a client at the turn of the
millenium she was trying to get to commit to implementing a
knowledge management solution to his professional practice's
professional development and training effort. It was a very
appropriate idea, but "Lennie Merullo" had been in the
profession a long time and nobody else did things that way. He
was new to this function and was understandably afraid of trying
to innovate and look like a fool. The consultant's boss trusted
her, but Lenny didn't.

My suggestion to her was to take Merullo to a knowledge
management trade show, where he could hear smart and enthused
fellow-managers talk about the benefits, be informed by their
questions, and see a broad field of systems, products and methods
offerings. She took my suggestion but had to cancel at the last
minute to take care of another client's emergency meltdown, and
Lennie went alone. "Better than nothing," I thought.

Wrong.

The first person he talked to was a vendor with a loud, garish
eye-catching booth. The vendor was selling a very powerful search
utility, something that could have made a fine last minute
addition to a knowledge management system, but could never be
even a critical component of a knowledge management system. The
company that made the utility had defined their product as
knowledge management, something that seemed hot at the time and
that many people didn't know better than to believe. The vendor
filled Lennie's head with vaporous illusions from which Lennie
didn't escape. For the rest of the show, his mind was empty to
the possibilities, filled only with this first easy-sounding
approach.

He came back. He insisted on implementing search and search
alone as what he called a knowledge management solution. He
wouldn't listen to her advice or warnings. The group wasted a few
months in implementation and tweaking the system but it didn't,
because it couldn't, yield any significant benefits.

A lot of innovation initiatives don't even have a 15-minute
presentation at a gabfest to justify their initiation. Frequently
in government and business especially, some higher-up will demand
a change in vague or unclear terms and the line manager will
implement without asking follow-up questions. Sometimes the
higher-ups don't know any more than they said (a common problem
in American management is executives who initiate even though
they're ill-informed because they feel like that's their rôle
and if they wenre't constantly launching a new re-org ot churning
dust-bunnies people would think less of them).

Don't pull a Lenny. Don't hesitate to innovate, but do at
least the easy-to-do research first, imagine how it moght work in
your own system, what you could do that would make it work better
in your context, or at least test it in a small, controlled way
before you hinge any significant effort on it.

And whatever you do, don't lace your shoes back-to-front
unless you have a great dental plan without co-pay..

PART II TO FOLLOW
Harris pulled another Lenny in the same move -- he decided Pierre
need to be more like Tony Gwynn and Wade Boggs, and in the next
entry, I tell you why it's impossible and why managers pull this Lenny
all the time.

2/26/2005 10:55:00 AM posted by j @ 2/26/2005 10:55:00 AM

Friday, February 25, 2005

Warrior In The SpotlightBut Adrift In The Doldrums

Reprise From Feb '04:

Synchronicity. I'm running this again because I an ex-client just called me about a situation exactly like the one I discuss, and because Don Malcolm, the baseball researcher whose work I discussed, is about to go back on line with some new material. With Don, it's bound to be stimulating and generate impassioned responses. And threats.

Ever had an employee who just shined in the crisis moments and
the most important assignments but sort of two-stepped his way to
mediocrity for the ordinary?

Don Malcolm, the Ralph Nader of sabermetrics (bound to
polarize a room into two groups: big fans and people who'd like
to strangle him because of their own inner demons or
limitations), published a new study to test a theory about
batters who hit differently against good opposition than they do
against bad. In Pedro Guerrero and the Dark Ravine, he
analyses year-by-year splits of Pedro
Guerrero's batting stats. Pete Warrior consistently,
almost universally, hit better against good teams than bad.

Here's a slice of the information, a part of Guerrero's
career, Don presented:

The first set of numbers are against good opponents (ones with good winning records), the
second set against bad ones (the teams with bad records). The key number is OPS+ a
single-number measure of offensive quality. Anything above 120 is very good, and usually only 16 to 20 players a year produce enough offense overall to have an OPS over 130. As you can see, while
Guerrero was excellent against bad teams, he was much better,
completely transcendant, against the good ones during this seven
year stretch, and only in one year was he just the same.

That's counter-intuitive. As a rule, better teams have better
pitching --not universally, but it's rarer for a good team to
have bad pitching that's easy to knock around than for a bad
team. For example in the National League in 2003, three of the
four teams that made the playoffs finished in the top half in
ERA, and the fourth, Atlanta, missed the top half by one spot.
All four teams were in the top half in fewest hits and walks and
homers allowed per 9 innings, and all but Atlanta were in the top
half in strikouts per 9 innings. That's one data point, &
while not universally determined, it's solid as a general
rule.

Malcolm has used this tool to try to see if there's some
predictive measure. For example, he noted Bobby Kielty failed
against poor teams while succeeding against good ones, and thinks
it might presage greater success the following season, that is,
that a breakdown against poor competition is possibly easily
remediated if it appears the batter has solid performance against
the good teams' pitching. Malcom's going to study a range of
other batters to see how common this pattern is and if it
correlates in a way that makes it useful as a predictor.

If it turns out Guerrero is very unusual, he might end up
being remembered for more than doing to third base fielding what
Hitler did to Poland.

BEYOND BASEBALLOutside of baseball, you see this pattern all the time.
It's very common in sales departments because too frequently the
department has designed incentives to reward the sharks who can
close big deals now. So a lot of salesfolk
reserve their biggest efforts for the star venues.

Ever go to a Broadway performance in the afternoon? If the
main cast members and not the understudies are on stage, you'll
inevitably see one or two who are award-deserving at night
performances easing through with minimum effort during the day.

I worked with a copywriter who only pulled out the stops for
the marquee jobs -- she could be brilliant or
mediocre/replacement level (by choice) and it correlated totally
to the name-recognition of the client.

In France, the whole nation's organizational culture used to
be gripped by this. Perhaps it's not such a sharp dichotomy now,
but when I lived there, if you went to a fine restaurant, you got
exceptional cooking, much better than the average for here. If
you went to a low-end place, it was much below our average. This
pattern even extended to individual menu items: they'd make a
giant, Pedro Guerrero effort on the fancy specials, and two-step
in an ordinary way down at the bottom of the menu with their less
expensive or showy dishes.

As a manager you can control quality when you notice this
pattern. You can try to balance the mojo for particular jobs by
offering other incentives (gifts, recognition, etc.) on the
apparently-lesser jobs. You can try to fake out the Pedro
Guerrero by telling her these unimportant jobs really are marquee
(short term possibility, not long). If you have multiple staff,
you can just give all the high-tone jobs to the Guerrero
and dole out the rest to everyone else (I don't recommend this
approach). Or you can confront the Guerrero and tell her she has
to show better effort on the less showy jobs.

The approach you take should hinge on what other staff you
have and whether you think the Guerrero can change. But there's a
lot to learn by following Malcolm's approach and trying to
discern patterns. You should always be observing your staff to
see what they do well and don't do well, so you can optimise your
task delegation, change incentives or re-design job descriptions.

¿And while you're at it, will you puh-leeze get Pedro
Guerrero off third base and back into left field?

2/25/2005 06:57:00 AM posted by j @ 2/25/2005 06:57:00 AM

Monday, February 21, 2005

The Day the Gonzo Died

From The
Kentucky Derby is Decadent & Depraved:

He had done a
few good sketches, but so far we hadn't seen that special kind of
face
I felt we would need for a lead drawing. It was a face I'd seen a
thousand times
at every Derby I'd ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as the
mask of the whiskey gentry
--a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal
identity crisis; the inevitable
result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture.
One of the key genetic rules
in breeding dogs, horses or any other kind of thoroughbred is
that close inbreeding
tends to magnify the weak points in a bloodline as well as the
strong points. In horse
breeding, for instance, there is a definite risk in breeding two
fast horses who are
both a little crazy. The offspring will likely be very fast and
also very crazy.
So the trick in breeding thoroughbreds is to retain the good
traits and filter out the bad.
But the breeding of humans is not so wisely supervised,
particularly in a narrow Southern society
where the closest kind of inbreeding is not only stylish and
acceptable, but far more convenient
--to the parents--than setting their offspring free to find their
own mates, for their own reasons
and in their own ways. ("Goddam, did you hear about
Smitty's daughter?
She went crazy in Boston last week and married a ni*!")
So the face I was trying to find in Churchill Downs that weekend
was a symbol,
in my own mind, of the whole doomed atavistic culture that makes
the Kentucky Derby what it is.Hunter S. Thompson

I'm doing my twice a year divergence off topic to pay brief
tribute to a unique talent who was one of the inspirations that
propelled me into sportswriting. Hunter S. Thompson, Raoul Duke,
died yesterday, and, as with every other creative act he
performed, on a deadline of his own choosing.

This isn't going to be an obit. There's no point, because good
ones have already appeared, most notably this
one in The San Francisco Chronicle. It's not going to be
post-mortem praise (he was a reprehensible id-monster in many
ways, especially in his dealings with women; he had a hell of a
time meeting any deadlines). Consider it a explanation of why he
is important, even when his writing rarely reached the miracle
standard of which he was capable. I think he created a lot of the
foundation that evolved into the smashmouth Internet and TV
journalism tradition that features adversarial in-your-face
criticism. I think Thompson, however, picked targets he truly
disliked. He didn't just go out of his way to fabricate his
disdain in order to have something to say. And there's a lot of his
cognitive DNA in my own writing, at least a lot of the portion
that's worth reading. And I came upon the magic of his good
writing at an early age.

When I was still a teenager, he wrote a lengthy article, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent & Depraved, for Scanlon's Monthly, a
magazine I subscribed to. I didn't know who he was (I think he'd
never published anything in his own voice, just that which went
through standard editing) but he made a big impression on me. I
read the article three times at the first sitting. It was like no
other reporting I'd ever read about sports -- or anything else.
Because of this article, I came to believe my interest in sports
meant more than the enjoyment I got in being a fan or playing at
them.

I was wacky about sports. I played whenever I could and
followed them, to, until I lost interest in following for a time,
but I kept my passion for playing. It seemed to me, even then,
that sports were not just standalone events, but revealing views
of our culture -- inextricable from who we were as a society.

If you've never read Thompson at his best, that fear and
loathing at the Kentucky Derby article I linked to above is a
trenchant example of that insight, and one, I think, he trumped
just once. It embodies what I think are the two original aspects
to his writing.

WHAT THE WHOLE HEP-WORLD WOULD BE DOING
IF THE NAZIS HAD WON THE WARFirst, his writing voice was profane, salted with focused
anger, and wrapped the story away from the on-field event and
around the meaning the event had in the watchers' lives and what
choices those lives were taking. He used the most popular of
popular culture as a way to observe and analyse and comment on
the culture in which he lived and sub-cultures to which he was an
outsider. A traditional ethnographer brings to the table a
certain aloofness, neutrality to the observation. She's careful
not to create stress, a factor which always changes behavior.

Thompson intentionally created stress. There's nary a shred of
sympathy for the insiders, barely any constraint on the cognitive
terrorism he was compelled to release on the
"connected", especially in making up lies to mess with
their cognates, as in this excerpt from the Derby story:

"Say," he said,
"you look like you might be in the horse business...am I
right?"

"No," I said.
"I'm a photographer."

"Oh yeah?" He
eyed my ragged leather bag with new interest. "Is that
what you got there--cameras? Who you work for?"
"Playboy," I said.

He laughed. "Well,
goddam! What are you gonna take pictures of--nekkid horses?
Haw! I guess you'll be workin' pretty hard when they run the
Kentucky Oaks. That's a race just for fillies." He was
laughing wildly. "Hell yes! And they'll all be nekkid
too!"

I shook my head and said
nothing; just stared at him for a moment, trying to look
grim. "There's going to be trouble," I said.
"My assignment is to take pictures of the riot."

"What riot?"

I hesitated, twirling the
ice in my drink. "At the track. On Derby Day. The Black
Panthers." I stared at him again. "Don't you read
the newspapers?"

The grin on his face had
collapsed. "What the hell are you talkin' about?"

"Well...maybe I
shouldn't be telling you..." I shrugged. "But hell,
everybody else seems to know. The cops and the National Guard
have been getting ready for six weeks. They have 20,000
troops on alert at Fort Knox. They've warned us--all the
press and photographers--to wear helmets and special vests
like flak jackets. We were told to expect shooting..."

"No!" he shouted;
his hands flew up and hovered momentarily between us, as if
to ward off the words he was hearing. Then he whacked his
fist on the bar. "Those sons of bitches! God Almighty!
The Kentucky Derby!" He kept shaking his head. "No!
Jesus! That's almost too bad to believe!" Now he seemed
to be sagging on the stool, and when he looked up his eyes
were misty. "Why? Why here? Don't they respect
anything?"

I shrugged again.
"It's not just the Panthers. The FBI says busloads of
white crazies are coming in from all over the country--to mix
with the crowd and attack all at once, from every direction.
They'll be dressed like everybody else. You know--coats and
ties and all that. But when the trouble starts...well, that's
why the cops are so worried."

He sat for a moment,
looking hurt and confused and not quite able to digest all
this terrible news. Then he cried out: "Oh...Jesus! What
in the name of God is happening in this country? Where can
you get away from it?"

"Not here," I
said, picking up my bag. "Thanks for the drink...and
good luck."

Thompson knew this truth: That in any culture, sport is where
people go to escape the constraints of their everyday lives, whether
it's as a spectator or as a participant. For most who are
interested, it's an area of vulnerability because they willingly
make themselves vulnerable in this area of their lives. We all
know the jock or rabid fan who, unable to bond to a significant
other for more than handful of weeks is completely capable of
having an emotional breakdown about a favored team's loss, a
jockey out sick and missing a day of racing the fan was going to
bet on, or even a trade that merely looks bad and hasn't
actually played out yet.

So it's ethnologically revealing to observe people at
"play", involved in sports, because they are more
likely to reveal their own nature and their culture's.

Thompson took that a step farther. He hosed down the
vulnerable with stress to elicit raw behavior, an attempt to peel
back the gauze all see through when we look at our own culture.
Everything they were comfortable with, he screwed with. All the
small behaviors became big, easier (and more comical and sad and
disgusting) to observe.

So Thompson's first original view was: Whatever you could
observe in people that was worth knowing was more easily observed
through their relationship with sports. The results were
stunning. Hunter Thompson knew and revealed more about the American
character between the coasts as it existed and exists than any of
the other ethnographers who have tried to describe it. He doesn't
bring the effete filters of the coastally acculturated observers
who have tried to explain it. If you ever need to go on a journey
to the heart of the American dream, Thompson is the most astute
native observer of non-coastal American values you could take along.

INNOVATING THE TRUTH
His other original approach was his relationship with the truth.
Professional journalism has a prescribed relationship with the
truth. It's been sagging in the last couple of decades with more
business-oriented management that knows the tough consequences of
some truths to the bottom line. But the average professional
reporter has a very high standard and an automatic response to
issues that might muddy that in a story.

Thompson's stories were truer than any of his competitors --
but they had nothing to do with the truth. He made up quotes,
perhaps entire days of reporting. So what makes him different
from Jayson
Blair who did it to avoid having to do real work? What makes
him different from Jack
Kelley who did it to burnish individual stories or his
reputation or his chances for a Pulitzer?

What makes Thompson's work and his relationship with the truth
original is his tales are in the Southern story-teller tradition:
Clearly not true in the details but aimed at finding the
essential truths about people and situations. You can throw away every who, what,
when and where in a Thompson story, but he
tended to dominate the competition with his exposition of the how
and why he wrote. Like John McGraw, he used his
competitors' adherence to the rules as an edge with which to beat
them senseless.

That traditional tightly-wound reporter relationship with the
truth makes his deviant grandiose and self-disserving
journalistic transgressions more enjoyable, even to someone who
buys into the tradition completely.

Hunter S. Thompson made a career out of making a rubble of
traditions. I think I wouldn't have liked him if we'd met. As a
former section editor, I have nothing but sympathy for the editor
who is responsible for deadlines that don't move who works with a
writer who is barely capable of meeting one. And it's worse when
that writer hits so many home runs. The average, replacement
level reporter who practices that relationship with time doesn't
last long -- you just get rid of her. But because you never know
if the assignment you give out to a writer like Thompson is going
to be one of those unforgettable gems, you tend to let him do
that to you over and over. Thompson just took joy in crashing
deadlines of others' choosing and chose to live his life and
produce his work on his own damned schedule.

I wasn't surprised then, that when it came time to meet his
final deadline, he wasn't about to let someone else or the Big
Managing Editor in the Sky pick the moment. He went out, as he
lived, on his own time and his own terms.

2/21/2005 07:15:00 PM posted by j @ 2/21/2005 07:15:00 PM

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Minnesota Twins' Cosmic Enlightenment:Success Through Knowingthe Contributor Is Not the Job Description

One of the most common whiffs in big organization management
is one they foolishly view as a big hit. That's the manager
deluding himself the job description (a title, a set of tasks and
directions) is the same things as the actual contributor doing
the job. Michelle is a CFO. Derek is a shortstop. Geoffrey is
a major general.

One of the secrets to the Minnesota Twins' chronic success is
that they don't delude themselves that way.

Of course, this "the contributor is the job
description" approach was net-positive early in the last
century. It took hold when the military and then as a result
manufacturing organizations divided jobs into finer and finer
pieces of defined work. Careful division enabled
machines/equipment to produce mass quantities of standardized
output. At the bottom layers of an organization, job descriptions
were defined around technologies, so that each person became a midwife
to the machine he worked with. As you moved up the hierarchy,
job descriptions were defined around controlling
and making uniform the output from the
people-who-were-the-machines'-peripherals.

This movement, because it was successful at producing income-
& output efficiencies in its early stages, became what many
ideas which are very successful in early, moderate applications
become. A Cult.

Simple-minded adherents figure if a tablespoon is useful, a
quart must be better. Followers of F.W. Taylor's theories (rolled
into a belief system called Taylorism)
ultimately worked his useful ideas into a Cult through roughly
the following set of conclusions:

Machines are hard-working
and close to predictable while humans are not.

Machines are superior to humans.

Why can't humans be more like machines?

If we treat humans like they were machines, they will
approximate the benefits we get from machines.

The more we treat humans as machines, the more benefit we can
get from them.
People and their skills can be better managed as though they
are machines.

If you're training lieutenants or QC line inspectors,
uniformity and predictability are core elements of success, but
that was true even in only a tiny minority of jobs. Taylorists
took this model off the battlefield and factory floor and applied
it to office work and even, eventually, creative endeavors (if
you doubt the latter, you've never watched TV sitcoms, where
every rôle is as uniformly & tightly defined from show to
show as brake drums coming off an assembly line). So even those
staffers who weren't midwives to machines had their talents
constrained by this expensive delusion that was not even vaguely
efficient outside of its original context.

THE TWINS AS TEST LAB -- GARDENHIRE
BLASTS ONE OFF F.W. TAYLOR
Many managers grew up in their careers taking the Cult that
Taylorism became as Truth. Baseball is a fantastic filter to
expose the fallacy. Some teams' scouting and field managers
follow the Cult to some degree, but most don't, and the ones that
don't perform better over time.

For years, observers looking at the Twins' opening day roster
and knowing the team owners' tight-fistedness would imagine that
failure was right around the corner. But the Twins are as adept
at winning games and getting into the playoffs as any team is.
One of their success techniques is the realization that the job
description is not the player and that a definition made at any
stage along the player's career might change to get better output
from the contributor in what is then the current context.

This week an
interview with team skipper Ron Gardenhire graced the pages
of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Three of the answers to the
reporter's questions displayed both this realization and how you
can apply it as a manager yourself.

Q: Coaches believe that
Michael Cuddyer has looked more comfortable at second than
third. How do you feel about playing him at third?
A: He could still play
second if Luis Rivas comes in and doesn't play well. I could
put Cuddy over at second. Then I can put [Eric] Munson at
third or Terry Tiffee. I've got options. There's lot of
things that could happen here, but I want Cuddyer over at
third. I think it is time. I think he is comfortable in the
major leagues and has been able to make adjustments to
different roles. I think he likes second base a lot, but he
also understands the opportunity to get 400-500 at-bats at
third, and I think he's ready for it.

Even in the majors, they've been using one of their leading
prospects, Michael
Cuddyer, in different positions on the field. They didn't
define him as a third-baseman or a second-baseman, or even a
utility infielder. They defined him, in part because of their own
requirements, as a player who got appearances at a couple of
positions while he matured and got used to the league. That also
gave them insights into his aptitudes at a major league level.

This management awareness is especially rare with a leading
prospect. While a young player of middling expectation will
frequently be tracked to be a utility player or swing-man, it's
the low expectations themselves that determine management
investing little attention in exactly how the player can be best
applied. Cuddyer is a high-ranked Twin prospect, and the
temptation with those hopefuls is to define them early and
tightly into a defined rôle. That simplifies management's work
(one less thing to have to think about is a benefit).

Please note, also, this rejection of the Cult that Taylorism
became isn't just about making Cuddyer feel good. Cuddyer
"likes second base a lot", but it's not about the
player's preferences, it's about what makes the most success for
the team and the player.

Beyond baseball, managers too often mistakenly view the
contributor as the job title he has, or constrain her possible
contributions to what's delineated on the job description. If you
don't experiment to discover what your staffer does well, you're
most likely pimping your employer and yourself, leaving unused
benefits to you and your organization unharvested.

Q: Do you view Joe Mays as
your No. 5 starter?
A: I hate putting
numbers on things. I view him as being one of our starters.
He has to prove he's healthy and can get hitters out. We want
Joe back. We've got some money behind this guy, and we hope
he lives up to his contract.

Gardenhire is working from the idea that the player is not the
job description. If you define someone as a #5 starter or a #1
starter, you're crazy-glued to the preconception that she is a
borderline contributor or an ace. This is another example of lazy
thinking. It provides the manager a chance to stop experimenting,
to reduce or stop observation, to reduce or stop mentoring and
training. If Mays gets hot, Gardenhire will use him as though
he's pitching well (the reality of Mays' performance, not the job
description)

Staffers, you'll find, are more like major league pitchers
than you'd like to think: Most are inconsistent. They have areas
of weakness and strength for sure, but over time these evolve,
and, of course, on any given day each might be playing to her
full potential or be having an off day in the field or something
in between. You have to stay alert and observant for these
changes, even if its inconvenient to your sense of comfort.
There's probably little you can do as a manager that will yield
more torque than observing your staffers and applying those
observations to deliver actions. Too many managers define the
contributor as a #5 starter and dissipate the organization's
investment by not getting the most out of him.

Q: Have you kicked around a
few lineups yet?
A: Oh, you do that all
winter. Some people have great ideas in these papers. I've
read the Internet and read projected lineups. It's all very
entertaining. First, you have to see who will be in the
lineup before you start writing down lineups. The big thing
in spring is getting guys at-bats. So, if I think a guy is
not getting enough at-bats, you'll see me bat him first or
second so he can get more at-bats.

Beyond baseball, it's a useful convenience to be able to have
a lineup in mind before a project starts. Who will do what, and
when. You need to have some concept of it when playing out the
project plan, at least a workable model. But more often than not
with human contributors, you get injuries and hot streaks and
cold streaks, and you have to cobble together a lineup on any
given day based on what the environment offers up, shifting
tasks, borrowing or loaning resources, creating ad-hoc work
teams, re-examining basic assumptions. If you spend too much time
mourning the inability to field your pre-conceived lineup, you
are likely to either try to stick with it even if it isn't
working, or to keep trying to force your staff into your
pre-conceived hopes in a Procrustean way.

Don't get ahead of yourself. Defined rôles tend to be useful
to a manager (reducing the number of decisions you have to make)
and tend to be easy on players (don't have to flex themselves as
much). But the net-benefit tends to be significantly less than a
flexible approach achieves, and certainly so in an organization
where the talent is the product.

A FINAL, QUICK NOTE
A lot of the defenders of the Cult that evolved from Taylorism
like to think, or at least argue, that alternatives are "new
age" or touchy-feelie. That's merely part of their delusion.

It's not "humanism" to break away from the Cult that
Taylorism became, or even humanitarian. It's just the cold
assessment that it doesn't work and can't work
in most workplaces outside of Red Chinese prison labor camps,
maquiladora sweat shops and TV sitcom development. Thinking
anything else is a delusion of the magnitude that thinking that machines can be like people (which is not only a delusion but sick, if you think about it -- who would want a machine to be like a person? What possible advantage could it have over a machine being a machine?). Letting the outmoded, implicit
assumptions spawned by the Cult that Taylorism became limits your
ability to advance productivity in the group you manage.

If you doubt it, just watch the Minnesota Twins' changes year
to year, the enlightened way they use the small-budget talent
they have flexibly to persist in being competitive.

2/19/2005 10:05:00 AM posted by j @ 2/19/2005 10:05:00 AM

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

It's always been the intent of this weblog to be more of a community than just a place for me to "flap my lips", as a great poet once said. It's been a while since I had a volunteer with the combo field experience and insights and a willingness to ante up those insights.

So I consider us lucky today to have a guest column from Brian Kopec (Willie Stargell's swing, Jose Canseco's back) of the Pirate-centric weblog Batting Third.

“We obviously realize the long-term goal is to win a championshipand we need some more players to do that."Dave Littlefield, GM, Pittsburgh Pirates, July 3, 2004

Have you ever worked for an organization that was under so much
pressure to compete in the immediate moment that decisions
management made to relieve that pressure undermined the long term
competitive goals of the organization? You can clearly see this
type of decision-making and its consequences in the competitive
and highly-pressurized world of professional baseball.

One of the great things about baseball is the inner workings of
management are visible to anyone who can read a newspaper. Every
decision, from the sale of ballpark-naming rights to who should
be the Class A Minor League team’s pitching coach, is
available for us to analyze.

EXAMPLE: THE PITTSBURGH PIRATES
The story of the Pittsburgh Pirates over the last decade delivers
a prime example of how poor performance begets pressure begets
even poorer performance.

In 1992,
the Pirates
lost in the NLCS for the third straight season. After the
season, the team suffered a critical, if predictable, blow when
league MVP Barry Bonds left as a free agent. Over the next three
seasons, the team stumbled to unimpressive 5th-, 3rd-,
and 5th place finishes. The recent history of playoff
appearances meant the media and fans granted a measure of
patience and latitude with the team’s management.

In 1996, then-General Manager Cam Bonifay announced a five-year plan
to bring the Pirates back to a championship level, coinciding
with the opening of a new ballpark. As years #2, #3, and #4 of
the plan expired, the fans, media and owner began to apply
pressure to win now, causing a subtle shift in the front
office’s execution.

Rather than building towards a championship, Bonifay’s front office
began making transactions designed to achieve short-term success,
and the kinds of moves they executed made it probable that
short-term meant short-lived, too. The Bucs signed aging veterans
such as injury-prone Kevin
Young in early 1999 and then in late 2000, they signed Derek
Bell (coming off a perfectly 50th percentile
season) both to overpriced
contracts. They did this as stop gaps in an attempt to
achieve the legitimacy of a .500 record to buffer the pressure
from fans, media and the owner.

In 2001, the 5th year of the plan, Bonifay was fired in
the midst of a last place season and replaced as GM by David
Littlefield.

Just as when Bonifay was hired, Littlefield was granted a measure of
patience by the fans and media because the team had just opened a
beautiful new park and because baseball insiders thought the farm
system looked buff after years of attention and build-up. Still,
pleasant surroundings can only distract the paying customers from
a mediocre (at best) present for so long. The pressure is back
on. The Littlefield front-office response to it has been eerily
similar to the botch-job that bit Bonifay.

This off-season, The Bucs made two transactions that provide mounting
evidence that pressure to produce a winner has caused
Littlefield’s team to lose sight of their long term goal to
win the championship.

12/16/04: The Pittsburgh Pirates
acquire 39 year old catcher Benito Santiago, along with cash
considerations, from Kansas City in exchange for 21 year old
pitching prospect Leo Nunez.

In both cases, Littlefield has acquired aged veterans with mixed
track records to staff positions at which the organization has
younger, better long term options. It can only be an attempt to
achieve short-term, short-lived success. Worse yet, in order to
acquire Santiago, Littlefield had to spend a promising young
pitching prospect. True, prospects like Nunez are nothing more
than a fistful of lottery tickets, but each is a lottery ticket
that may have a big future payoff. All of 40-year old
Santiago’s tomorrows are yesterdays; he’s certain to
have no future payoff.

Rather than acquire these veterans, the long term goal of the organization would have been better served by placing ready young players Mike
Gonzalez and JR House in those roles. The Pirates chances for
contending this year are small – the additional mojo they
can get from Mesa and Santiago, if it happens, won’t make
their goal of a championship improve, even microscopically.
Letting House and Gonzalez occupy those roster slots would also
save dollars for future use. And even if they fail, that is
valuable information to the long term success of the franchise;
it’s feedback on the farm system so the team can know what
specific skills it’s doing a good job with, and what other
aptitudes prospects need help with to succeed in the majors in
the current environment.

BEYOND BASEBALL
I once worked within a small division (we’ll call it
M) inside a medium sized company. This division produced and sold
a single product: a large, encompassing piece of software
designed for a specific, highly specialized industry with a very
limited but very wealthy pool of potential customers.

M was a bit of a misfit within the organization, the only division
that dealt in technology. The core competency of the company was
management consulting and its bread and butter clients were the
giant tobacco companies.

Within a couple of years of its debut, M’s product was able to
acquire a significant share of the market through M’s
willingness to rapidly produce feature-rich releases catered to
the smaller players in the industry who were otherwise unable to
develop competitive solutions in-house.

Unfortunately, the speed-to-delivery and complexity of the system resulted both
in high development costs and poor quality, not a good combo.
Still, the overall early strategy was thoroughly defensible: The
software product had very little competition and profit potential
was tremendous.

As the product matured, the division shifted resources from
development to code-stabilization efforts that were necessary to
ensure the long term (satisfaction of the customers) health of
the business. As the product gradually transitioned from a
development phase to more of a maintenance and licensing phase, M
moved towards profitability.

MANAGEMENT UNDER PRESSUREAs the 90s came to a close, reality slammed the main parts of the
company’s revenue streams with a double whammy: Shrinking
budgets for the company’s meat-and-potatoes consulting
services and the settlement of the tobacco lawsuits that sucked
money out of their biggest clients’ budgets temporarily.

The Board began to apply pressure on M to start pulling its weight.
Feeling the heat, M finally achieved profitability by securing
major contracts with the two largest players in the industry. M
secured the contracts in the same manner it had secured contracts
with the smaller players that had been its customers to date.
They promised each client a unique, customized software release
that catered specifically to their individual business. And they
promised to deliver it on a very aggressive schedule.

To meet these new contractual agreements, M shifted resources away
from the code stabilization efforts that had been demanded by its
legacy customers. As a result, the features added for the two
major clients were built on an unstable base, resulting in
continual quality acceptance issues. As a result, one of the
large clients and two legacy customers eventually ended their
relationship with M. Moreover, the other large client imposed
contractual penalties that have eaten whatever profits might have
remained n the deals.

As a result of the pressure for short term results, M’s
management made decisions that ultimately undermined its long
term success.

THE PIRATE'S LAMENT: WHY IS THE RUM GONE?
The M division is just like the Pirates.

Years of losing has deteriorated management’s patience and put
tremendous pressure to produce a winner (and pronto). To
temporarily relieve that pressure (and knowing any relief would
be merely temporary), both repeatedly undermined their long term
goals by wastefully applying resources that might have
contributed to the achievement of those goals.

Can you achieve short-term advantages without undermining long-term
goals? Of course, but you have to keep the goals in mind and
select from among the available short-term choices that
don’t significantly degrade your probabilities for the
future.

And under any circumstances, never sign Jose Mesa for a position that
has to succeed for you to succeed.

2/15/2005 07:21:00 AM posted by j @ 2/15/2005 07:21:00 AM

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy:Sandy's Half-Brother to Survivals

Angus' First Law
of Organizational Behavior:All human systems tend to be self-amplifying

A couple of people I've spoken with in e-mail the last month
asked about why I didn't have discussions here at MBB. The answer
is two reasons: (1) I had it turned on for a two week trials and
the signal to noise ratio was both as frustrating and putrid as a
Ben Davis at-bat with the game on the line, (2) Thanks to the
energetic and capable folk at MLB Center, I have a hosted place
for people to talk Management By Baseball (link).
A lot of people seem to nose around, few post, but the quality is
very good. Case in point, the insight from Sandy Hemenway that launched
this post.

Two weeks ago, I wrote on survivals, little shards of behavior
or process that originally had good reasons for being that no
longer had any value but that people followed because that's what
you're supposed to do. That piece on survivals opened like this:

One of the most challenging
human tendencies to overcome is also one of the most damaging
to management success. That tendency is to rest on a
presumption until it's outmoded, but act on it without
questioning it.

You sneeze and an acquaintance or stranger says "Bless
you" or "Gesundheit", a call-and-response
devised centuries ago to prevent evil spirits (or the batting stance of Craig Counsell) from inhabiting your body. The
father of American Anthropology Alfred Kroeber named these
autonomic, unexamined behaviors "survivals". Like
the useless buttons on the end of suit jacket sleeves that
clothing makers almost always add, these are things that are
done, unquestioned, with motivation invisible to the actor.
They just do it because they do it. And they like to repeat
these guidelines as advice to newcomers, perpetuating the
wierdness.

I posted the entry over at the MLB Forum area, and I got an
insightful comment from Sandy Hemenway. It uses fantasy baseball as the
underlying example, but his point about Self-Fulfilling
Prophecies happens in real baseball as well, as I'll explore
later. Sandy said:

When I was just getting my
feet in fantasy baseball, I jumped onto Sandbox, where
Fantasy Point (rather than ROTO) is the entree served. While I
fiddled around with the simple salary cap (hitters only)
game, I read the Forums to try and glean tactics from those
experienced before delving into an actual league with a
draft. In doing so, the most oft-repeated mantra was
"Pitching Wins!" This put me at a disadvantage
heading into my first drafts, since my only experience was
with the hitter-only salary cap game. I felt like I had a
good grasp on the relative value of hitters, but was mostly
flying blind in regards to pitchers.

So, when I drafted, I
naturally went with my strength, and concentrated on hitters
over pitchers. I EXPECTED to lose, and assumed my first year
would just be a learning experience.

I won the league.
Along the way I discovered the half-brother of the
"survival" -- the self-fulfilling prophecy.

A side-effect I expect is
common to many survivals is the SFP. In my above example, the
reality was since EVERYONE believed "pitching
wins", everyone drafted pitching hard and fast
(especially in the early rounds). Since EVERYONE was doing
it, the ultimate winner would (by default) claim, "see -
I drafted pitching first, and I won my league". The fact
that the 11 losers in the league did as well got more or less
ignored.

Too often in business, I
think MANY decisions end up becoming SFPs. You decide
"X" is a solution -- if you succeed, you laud
"X". If you fail, you look at the
"unforeseen" circumstances that prevented
"X" from behaving normally. It's a pity that more
business leaders don't understand some basic Latin:

post hoc ergo proctor
hoc: Greek for 'after the fact, therefore because of the
fact' - occurs when a temporal relation between two events is
assumed to prove that the first one caused the second one.

And let me add a point to Sandy's insight about the
pitcher-centric drafting. Not only, as he says, did people
believe they won because they drafted pitching first, it pushed
the environment into a situation where, because everyone skilled
was drafting pitching first, the team with the most successful
pitching probably had the best chance of winning.

MONOCULTURAL BODIES
In a monocultural system where all competitors adhere to the same
strategy, the one who executes the best at that approach (or has
the best luck at it) is most likely to win. So it's a
self-reinforcing process in the mold, mould really, of Angus'
First Law. Over time, the faith builds up to religious
proportions. Only an outsider more interested in experimentation
than just winning will discover the self-fulfilling prophecy is a
sensible idea that's ossified into automatic behavior.

The more monoculturally competitors attack their universal
baseball/business problem, the more successful a different,
equally (or perhaps not even quite as good) approach will favor a
new competitor.

The very success of the Billy Beane/Moneyball theory rested on
monocultural thinking by the overwhelming plurality of
competitors. As others saw that success was possible with the
DePodesta/Beane approach, the As shifted to rebalanced evaluation
methods for acquiring players -- several drafts after the book's
theories became widely known by the As antagonists, Oakland was
still taking some of the model of players they did when the book
as being written. But the Jeremy Brown/Kevin Youkilis types
became more highly valued and therefore it opened up new
opportunities for other kinds of valued players to slip to the As
in later rounds.

BEYOND BASEBALL
When I worked at a big airplane manufacturer's computer products
group, the outfit had a gatekeeper executive (I'll call him Bill
Klem) who had come over from the airplane company's safety
function.

Now, I am as opposed to buggy, crash-prone software as anyone
in the business -- I'm an extremist. But Bill Klem was foam at
the mouth rabid. In the aerospace business, zero defect/zero
tolerance for defects is a strength (ask the crews of the
Columbia or Challenger if I'm right). So it wasn't surprising
Klem would blanch when he heard the computer-word
"crash" spoken -- he just had to outlaw it.

But in the software business, especially in the development of
complex software, certain kinds of defects are things end-users
can ignore -- their consequences have work arounds or cause a
one- or two second delay in screen display or print gratuitously
a blank page at the end of a 21 page report. The challenge with
debugging software, as so many of you already know, is that
finding and repairing the defect that causes the blank page to
print can be just as time-consuming and difficult as finding a
serious flaw.

So while the group was trying to get out two new complex
software offerings, Bill Klem was holding them up until they were
zero defect like a commercial airliner would need to be. He
crashed numerous deadlines but was intransigent. Quarters passed
while competitors sold solutions to prospective customers.
Finally upper management stepped in and forced a new team into
the place of Klem's. The software shipped. It was very very high
quality, with some minor bugs, but lost momentum and customer
interest because it was so late to market.

Klem pointed out to anyone who would listen that it was the
bugs that killed the products' chances for success. And that's
the story that lives on. Last week, over a decade after I had
even thought of Bill Klem, I ran into a old colleague and in
talking he repeated the Klem version as gospel. Apparently, the
company internalized that "lesson" and is still
struggling with its own internal software because it over-values
zero-defect code.

This fits Sandy's insight of selective post-facto description
of causation.

BTW: The bugginess of commercial software is a self-fulfilling
prophecy, too. Because the IT customers for most commercial
software believe bugginess is a "normal" state of
affairs, they are willing to buy and deply buggy software and
wait for some updates or service packs to fix obvious problems.
In turn, this emboldens software publishers to allow more major
bugs into the systejms they sell as release-quality. Of course,
if the bugs affect IT a lot, that's costly, and if they hose the
executives, that's costly. But if they just inconvenience a wide
swath of ordinary users, well, IT will go along with it because
the lost productivity never shows up on their books --
and the self-amplifying model comes into play again. It probably
takes more courage on the part of an IT department to refuse to
buy buggy software than a service department can be expected to
have.

It only takes a little ante and a willingness to perhaps implode publically to got against the self-fulfilling prophecies of competitors. In real baseball or real organizations outside it, it takes
more courage to do it.

In reality, that's really a choice opportunity. Because the
more courage it takes, the more uniform the adherence to the norm
will be, the more value there is to be harvested in taking a
different, well-thought-out strategy.

Think like Paul DePodesta or Sandy Hemenway and take a chance on an
alternate strategy in facing a monocultural belief system.

2/13/2005 08:29:00 PM posted by j @ 2/13/2005 08:29:00 PM

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Negotiation Tip #7: Barry Bonds' Biceps,Brad Reed & Marvin Miller

One of the 20th century's most successful negotiators in any
field was baseball's Marvin Miller. The man who created an
effective (close to undefeated in head-to-head competition)
baseball players' association, is a lawyer who built upon his
strong aptitude at research and division of labor with a passion
for achievement, then topped it with an ability to play out
strings of consequences and a knack for innovation to create, and
to some degree control, change.

One of the aptitude clusters that enabled him to be more than
just a visionary (dime-a-dozen) and actually render change in a
deliberate, channeled way, was his extraordinarily fine ability
to negotiate. I've written about negotiation a number of times
here; I believe it's one of the essential tools for almost any
management position, so I won't blather on that subject again (if you want background on why its
essential, use the Google search blivet in the top left corner of
the MBB home page and search for "negotiation").

Because baseball is such an open book relative to other
enterprises, the way negotiators use tools is on as full display
as you'll ever see them. One of the tools in Miller's kit became
obvious lately, thanks to insightful reader Brad Reed.

Back on January 26, I wrote
about Marvin Miller's comments on the baseball-in-steroids
scandal. Miller pointed out there was no evidence whatsoever that
bulkier players, steroids or no, were more effective or better
players, and also that while Bonds looked bulkier than he was as
a young player, that's a normal pattern for athletic men as they
age and he made Babe Ruth (unarguably pre-steroids) the case in
point. I support both Miller's contentions, and most of the mail
I got disagreed, missed the points and argued others.

The elegant and valuable exception was the message from Reed
that pointed out one of the essential tactics of successful
negotiation: Selecting the facts that support your
conclusions while concurrently knowing the other, opposing,
facts. Miller has mastered this, as Reed points out, and if
you're ever going to be a great neogtiator, you'll need to be
adequate at this, too.

Brad Reed's note (abridged):

Though I agree
wholeheartedly with the point of your posting on January 26,
2005, I think there's something that should be added.

Marvin Miller's assertions are a creative use of
cherry-picking facts.

By pairing the sight of Barry Bonds at twenty-one versus
forty-one, Miller makes Bonds's gain in bulk seem wholly
natural. Hey, Cal Ripken was a reed-thin whip when he
arrived, and left the game a beefy man. Happens all the time,
even among non-athletes. But here's the shifty part: Bonds's
increase in weight came in his late thirties. Natural
"filling out" occurs in a man's early twenties.

Until recently, Bonds was a thin figure. Bonds at twenty-one
and Bonds at thirty-one weren't that different in stature.
Even when lifting weights conscientiously, a man in his late
thirties cannot produce the rapid increase in bulk that Bonds
demonstrated without chemical assistance.

Miller has to know this. Yet he obscured this fact by using a
wide data set (twenty years) rather than the relevant data
set (seven years or so) when making his point.{SNIP} I think
it important to point out Miller's rhetorical trick.

It is important. Though I would call it the second
half of a technique rather than a trick.

CHERRY-PICKING FACTS IS THE EPILOGUEIn any negotiation outside one's own family, one needs
first to line up the facts on both sides and weigh them,
examine them before the actual negotiation.If you only do the
second part, cherry-pick your supporting facts, you've not done
half the job, you've done, effectively, none of it. You won't be
in a position to know your antagonist's side of the equation. If
you aren't prepared to negotiate her side as well, you have put
yourself at a disadvantage when she counters because you won't
have turned over in your hands the strengths and weaknesses of
that constellation of arguments. Like always swinging at the
first pitch, you never give yourself a chance to maneuver the
conversation where it benefits you.

Marvin Miller always understood his antagonists' arguments at
least as well as they did themselves, sometimes even better. I
suggest strongly, if you haven't already read Miller's
autobiographical history of the time he played point for the
players' union, A
Whole Different Ballgame, it's fascinating reading and
great support for one's negotiation education as well as other
necessary management tools.

BOTH HALVES OF THE TECHNIQUE
One of my favorite parts of this tool is it's easy to practice
both halves of it, like a simulation. You can take incidents from
your own organization or baseball, and research both sides of the
facts, organize them, guess which ones will emerge in the
dialogue, prepare both sides. If you shadow in-process ones
within your organization you're not involved in directly, you can
watch the events play out and correct or improve your abilities.
Then, when the real thing comes up, you'll have had practice at
the techniques. For some people, this simulation would fall into
the category of "fun" (hey, it's more fun than
rotisserie baseball, and a lot more useful).

But you have to practice both halves. Too many of our
fellowww-passengers on the 'net are lost in their own side,
either refusing to see the countering facts or pretending to not
see them, and neither is a becoming trait in any humanoid over
the age of three.

AND BACK TO BRAD REED
My sole disagreement with Reed is on the bulk of the weight gain
for most athletic men being in the early twenties. Not that that
doesn't happen often (and may be the general case), but across
the wider population, genetic makeup accounts for a decent
variance (if you're in your late 30s or older, think of the men
you went to college with and how they've changed over time. That
Endy Chavez-bodied guy at 20 who turned Full Metal Matt Stairs at
28 after he got married or waxed Jabba The John Kruk at 33 for no
apparent reason are certainly present in the population).

But Reed knows the strengths and weakness of Miller's
arguments. Which is more than I can say for Atlanta
Journal-Constitution columnist Terence Moore, who definitely saw
only one side or pretended to in his contention.

"I would not vote for
any artificially inflated player - and that includes Barry
Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire," Atlanta
Journal-Constitution columnist Terence Moore said. "If
this is true, this is worse than the Black Sox scandal and
then, you were only talking about a few players on one team.
This affects everybody. You're hurting guys like the Mickey
Mantles and the Babe Ruths and you're hurting people in the
game now that are legitimate."

¿Would he have voted for Ruth, who had the advantage of
playing his entire career with advantages contemporary players
never had...such as the exclusion of a whole swath of athletes
who were as good or better than the "caucasian" subset
of men who were allowed to play the game and the intentional
exclusion of men they called "colored" without
consideration of skill/merit? Moore hasn't proved (that I can
find anywhere) that supplements of any kind that McGwire and
Bonds have taken affect performance, but he's cherry-picking
players, supposition and facts to argue why he should segregate
the Hall of Fame.

I've had some fun in negotiations before with half-ways like
Moore. If they are really unprepared, you can take over the whole
shebang, argue their side for them, say things like, "Well,
you missed this lovely argument on your side, to which I
suggest...". I don't suggest you ruin them in the terms of a
negotiation, unless you never want to do business with them ever
again. But you should walk away with every single reasonable
thing you could.

I'd love to see a negotiation between Moore and Reed. Or Moore
and Miller. Though it would be sort of like Bambi Meets Godzilla.

2/09/2005 08:45:00 AM posted by j @ 2/09/2005 08:45:00 AM

Sunday, February 06, 2005

Jung at Heart: Curt Schilling & Smashing QuesTecs

Organizations' application of pop-psychology systems and tests
is proportional to their expected margin. In phat times like
the 90s, people partied with them, but in lean times like these,
you see them in the field less frequently than that old TV commercial
with George Steinbrenner plugging Prozac.

A lot of those pop-psych systems sold to big organizations
aren't actionable in the field; their introduction in the
workplace is the consequence of someone with budget authority
falling in love with it for the insights he learned from it
wanting to spread the joy. I'm not suggesting there's not useful
information to harvest from these systems, just that their
lessons generally are less applicable to organizational
development than they are to individual
development. I call these glancing discoveries a
"Yreka", a disappointing minor league example of the
Archimedean "Eureka" discoveries that have serious
torque.

So I was pleased this morning to discover someone is using my
personal favorite Eureka pop-psych test on baseball players as a
way to help them compete more effectively. I'm disappointed that,
in what appears to be a marketing gimmick, they are way
over-reaching the general value of the test's strengths and
making it sound like a panacea, a potentially dangerous
implementation of the method. I'll re-hash the essence of this
morning's news, summarize the method's strengths and its limits,
and tell you its applications.

You may recognize the interviewees model as the Myers-Briggs
personality model, morphed out of the work of Carl Jung. If the
language puts you off a bit, be patient, there's some real,
practical value in the system, at least as generally used, and
you don't have to be fully Jung At Heart to apply it.

SNAKE-BIT BY THE BIG UNIT &
SCHILLING
Thanks to Baseball
Primer, I got to read the Boston Globe's Shira Springer article
about the pretentious-sounding Brain Type Institute's analysis of
personality types (they call them Brain Types) of some star
pitchers.

Brain typer Jon Niednagel
has never sat, radar gun in hand, and watched Randy Johnson
pitch. But from what he has observed a short distance from
the mound and heard in postgame interviews, Niednagel
identified the new Yankees pitcher as the rare INTJ brain
type -- a left-brained, dominant intuitive. Niednagel feels
confident drawing certain conclusions about Johnson's
strengths and weaknesses. "You want to get to Randy
Johnson earlier because as a left-brainer he comes out a
little bit more mechanical, a little bit more nervous and
uptight," said Niednagel. "The longer he throws,
he'll often get better because he'll relax, whereas Pedro
[Martinez] and even [Curt] Schilling, high-energy right
brains, can come out pretty strong. Randy Johnson will start
off slower.

"If I managed against him, I would make him go deep in
the count. You get him frustrated. An INTJ will melt down
faster than other types. And as a dominant intuitive,
unpleasant reality shakes them up a little bit."

Excluding the brain-typing terms, none of this should come as
news to Yankee manager Joe Torre or Red Sox manager Terry
Francona. With established All-Stars such as Johnson,
Martinez, and Schilling, Niednagel explains why the best in
the game behave and pitch the way they do, why Johnson
confronts a cameraman, why Martinez calls the Yankees
"my daddy," why Schilling competes with a
dislocated ankle tendon. {SNIP}

The Brain Type Institute, if their site is
any indication, has taken the Myers-Briggs temperament sorter as
a foundation and has built on top of it a cornucopia of tools and
techniques they've snipped from elsewhere, then blended it all
into a proprietary amalgam. It seems from their testimonials that
they already do a lot of work with individual athletes and teams,
so if Niednagel is a decent practitioner, his insights quoted are
likely somewhat- or very valid. But when I look at that site and
look at the range of "hot topics" unrelated to
temperament sorting, my "marketing over-hype alert"
goes off. Here's a snippet that makes me wary:

BTI began genetically
researching the various Brain Types in the mid-1990s. Neurotransmitter
DNA analysis was done at a prominent American
university. Though neurotransmitter evaluation is still
ongoing, BTI has also ventured into other genetic fields,
searching for additional clues. One such area is Proteomics,
where our ultimate goal is to identify the various inborn
Brain Types strictly by urine analysis.

I'm not saying this is hype. It's that the
wording in this marketing face and the conflation of so many
trendy scientific areas in one paragraph smells like the pitch of
a cold-call stockbroker looking to puff up pre-IPO interest. The
bad grammar ("genetically researching") may also color
my opinion based on my personal prejudice. I'm agnostic about
them, though. I'm always interested in people that dedicate time
and effort into new systems of understanding that have practical
applications.

DEFINITELY WORTH PAYING ATTENTION TO
The Myers-Briggs sorter, especially in the practically-oriented
incarnation smacked out into the field by David Keirsey &
Marilyn Bates in their pop-psych book Please
Understand Me is an extra-base hit for managers (and
non-managers, too). It's a simplified version of the Jungian
system, with four binary scales that result in sixteen
permutations (with the results stated, like in the Neidnagel
quotes, as four-letter codes like the INTJ he cites for
Randy Johnson).

This method was very popular in workplaces during most of the
Nineties. You may already know all this and your own type. If
not, here's a site when
you can fill out the sorter for free (registration req'd.)
& get the results with some short analysis. Let me state firmly
before you go, that you may be one of the significant minority of
people who are a different type in the workplace than you are at
home. Myers-Briggs enthusiasts won't usually tell you that, so if
you're going to take the self-test, decide upfront which
"you" you're going to answer as.

Once you've got some background in the method and understand
the scales and the way they affect temperament, you can interact
with a person in a public setting for as little as five to
fifteen minutes and judge if they have a strong tendency towards
one of the types. (NOTE: People generally exhibit different types
through their life as they change; and as I already mentioned,
many, not most, people have a different type at home in private
than they do in a public, workplace, setting.).

This sense of probable type isn't an Echelon into someone's
psyche that will permit you to know their innermost thoughts or
manipulate them. It's a glance into the kinds of things that
probably inspire them, probably motivate them. It's a hook to a
strong possibility of better communication. That's why it's
useful to a manager to work with the system long enough to
harvest the ability to judge probable workplace type.

What kind of information can you get out of a quick, simple
profile once you've interacted enough to get a probable type? As
Neidnagel says about Pedro Martínez later in the Springer piece:

"Rather than being
big-picture strategic, Pedro is one of those STs that's the
best tactician," said Niednagel. "In the spur of
the moment, they're really, really good. Pedro's type is
great at seeing a guy in the batter's box and noticing every
little thing. I'll bet if you went and talked to his manager,
he would say Pedro is uncanny at noticing little quirks about
opposing hitters.

This is actionable information for a pitching coach or a
fellow-player looking to expand his knowledge by asking for help.
It also provides a manager looking to provide coaching. For
example, Neidnagel says in the article that Schilling is of the
ENTP type. Here's a quote from the book Please Understand Me
about Schilling's type. The says there's:

...a reclacitrance on the
part of the NT -- even from an early age -- to accept without
question in the domain of ideas even a widely acepted
authority. The fact that a certain person proclaims
soemthing, whatever his or her title, reputation or
credentials, leaves the NT indifferent. The pronouncement
must stand on its own merits, tried in the court of
coherence, verification and pragmatics. {SNIP}This
recalcitrance to established authorities tends to make an
NT...seem unusally individualist and even arrogant.

Wow...that's Curt Schilling to a T: Critical of the owners,
critical of the union, and critical enough of the QuesTec Umpire
Evaluation System technology to pull a Mike Tyson and demolish
the Phoenix ballpark's installation to make known his personal
opinion.

In general, I'm very enthused about the high value of knowing
enough about the Keirsey-Bates model to apply it at work. I don't
think that alone it's the One Big Thing that will make you
successful at people management. But if you apply it in its areas
of highest value, tweaking work assignments to play to individual
strengths, cobbling together ad-hoc teams with complementary
types, and most of all in refining communication with the people
who report to you, it's a big winner. These three applications
are all important requirements for success at Second Base in the MBB
Model.

But I'll reassert here: It's a tool, not a personal Echelon,
everything you need to know about someone. People are not types
-- they are, at any given moment, somewhat like, or very much
like, the description of a type, and different individuals
embrace a specific type more or less tightly over time than
others do.

So when Sean Casey's testimonial for the Brain Type Institute
tells me ""When I talked to Jon Niednagel, I felt like
he had been living in my head for 27 years," I want to ask
him, "Dude, have you been paying rent?"

2/06/2005 03:37:00 PM posted by j @ 2/06/2005 03:37:00 PM

Friday, February 04, 2005

Last week I
wrote about "survivals", behaviors that made sense
when their practice began or when they were institutionalized,
but that are now behavioral plaque, no longer delivering their
original benefit. I promised to describe a method I use to
discover and expose them.

AN ASIDE: WHEN SURVIVALS WERE ALWAYS
DYSFUNCTIONAL
My presumption was that, like the sacrifice bunt, the survival
was a net-benefit when it got institutionalized. Most survivals
are. But a reader who works at a mega-sized multi-national that
gets a lot of its margin from armaments chided me for giving
survivals that benefit from the doubt. I'll call her "Bill
Klem". Klem pointed out that her corporation is stuck with
an onerous time-keeping system that requires every single
employee to spend anywhere from four to 24 minutes a day to track
and report one's time...and that's when the gathering equipment
is working.

She asserts that it was never adaptive. Burning up some spare
time, she wandered over to the Admin building and interviewed
people in the department that collected the data to report to
payroll. She discovered the Genesis of the system

"In the late
seventies, the VP Finance wanted to upgrade to a more
technological capture system. He intended to bid out the
system but along the way met a fellow rotarian who worked
with a company which had bought a small time-reporting
hardware company and was diversifying into software and
systems. They were looking for partners to buy the new
products that wern't designed yet. They were going to let the
pioneers help design the product.

The veep bought in to the
idea and took it back to the company. Well, it took almost
thirty months to get approval. By that time, the system guys
had finished their design. For some reason, my company went
ahead and bought the system thatn had been designed for an by
other companies in a different industry.

What we bought didn't EVER
work for us, not from the get-go, and not now. Just because
its a survival does not mean it was ever functional."

Klem has a really good point. Not all survivals started out as
net-positive.

But I'll reiterate what I mentioned in the previous entry,
which is that in general, the most stubborn survivals are those
that were so effective in their original context that their
virtue became an article of Faith that people supported without
continued examination.

Rooting out those once-useful methods or behaviors requires
finding them first. And my esteemed colleague, Joe Ely, agreed to
tag-team, writing about techniques we use to find the survivals
so we can figure out if they have any value. Then, in turn, you
can answer the questions:

Does it still work in its present
form?

Could it be tweaked to be more
effective?

Why did it develop in the first
place?*

The first two questions are of a different nature than the
last; they face the present and near-future, and are designed to
help you make an immediate judgement. The last is about knowledge
management, understanding where this came from so you and your
associates can understand how functional solutions can evolve
into survivals. Knowing that helps you design methods for better
on-going evolution as well as acting as a visible lesson in the
costs of insensitivity to the entropy of ignored bahevior plaque.

JOE'S JOLT INCUBATOR: FOLLOWING FLOW
Joe Ely's first shared technique is to follow the flow and see
where it's being slowed or re-directed. He wrote about it here.

Please read his entry then come back here.

The essence of this first technique is to ask the question:
What Stops Flow?

Like a batter hitting a gapper and steaming into second base
only to discover the slow-poke who had been on first stopped
there already, plaque stops flow.

Not all flow-stoppers are survivals.
Not all survivals are flow-stoppers.

But starting with Joe Ely's approach will mow down a mess 'o
survivals and other behavioral plaque build-up and is a fun and
easy technique you can turn into a group activity in the
lunchroom or even as a formal process.

In my next entry, I'll talk about how the sacrifice bunt
illustrates the lag time in adapting to new situations and how
you can get half-way to evolving only to stall out before you
reap the full benefits of change.